Exploring the Wildest Places on Earth

Exploring the Wildest Places on Earth

For 125 years, National Geographic has sought out the wildest sights—just imagine what we’ll find next.

A tiger peers at a camera trap it triggered while hunting in the early morning in the forests of northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Tigers can thrive in many habitats, from the frigid Himalaya to tropical mangrove swamps in India and Bangladesh, yet are facing extinction as wild spaces disappear and human pressures mount.

Photograph by Steve Winter, National Geographic

Aloft in a wilderness of blowing sand, Alain Arnoux pilots his motorized paraglider in tricky winds along a massive dune in Iran’s vast Lut Desert. Arnoux, a champion flier, has assisted photographer George Steinmetz on more than a dozen aerial expeditions to document the shape-shifting beauty of the world’s arid zones.

Photograph by George Steinmetz, National Geographic

A harbor seal peers from a kelp forest on Cortes Bank, a series of undersea peaks and plateaus off the coast of San Diego. This shallow, light-filled summit supports a wide variety of animals and plants. “The communities you find on seamounts are like oases in otherwise deep water,” says Bruce Robison, senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.

Photograph by Brian Skerry, National Geographic

A green turtle glides over a wasteland of dead coral near Kanton Island, one of the Phoenix Islands in the central Pacific. Before water temperatures spiked here in 2002-2003, this reef was brimming with life. There are promising signs of recovery in the mostly undisturbed waters, now part of the Phoenix Island Protected Area.

Photograph by Brian Skerry, National Geographic

Nyiragongo, a two-mile-high volcano with a fiery lava lake, stands on the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is one of the most active volcanoes on the planet and also one of the least studied. At the base of the volcano sprawls the city of Goma, home to an estimated million people.

Photograph by Carsten Peter, National Geographic

A hummingbird and a Panamanian orchid make a perfect pair as the bird unwittingly assists in flower pollination. Many plants self-pollinate, but most orchids need help—often provided by the birds and the bees—to reproduce.

Photograph by Christian Ziegler, National Geographic

They’re fierce, they have a four-foot wingspan, and they punch with their talons. Ural owls are aggressively territorial.

Photograph by Sven Začek

In East Africa’s Afar depression sulfur and algae turn hot springs into pools of living color. The water is condensation from hot gases rising from magma chambers. As the water evaporates, salts and minerals form a vivid crust.

Photograph by George Steinmetz, National Geographic

Antarctica’s Mount Erebus is the most southerly active volcano in the world. Inside the ice caves the volcano’s warm, wet air freezes into frost crystals that grow into different shapes, depending on how the air currents flow. Here, an expedition member investigates the passages of Hut Cave.

Photograph by Carsten Peter, National Geographic

A male cheetah assumes a lookout pose in a fig tree in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve. His prospects are sobering. Shy and aloof by nature, requiring vast spaces to live and hunt, the planet’s fastest sprinters are in a race for their very survival.